Thanks to Stef to point this my way - it is hilarious. Cross posted from Rory Blyth - make sure to check out his post for all the hilarious story. Sadly, this is dejavu for me…. :)

As a developer, you’ve probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of “data” by someone in marketing and told to “do something with it.”

Columns probably didn’t line up, and a thousand different fonts were used. Every feature of Excel was probably abused and abused again in order to avoid having to use an actual database application for storage of the data.

Of course, it’s up to you to make sense of the layout, and they could just give a bleepity-bleep about what a pain in the ass it is to suck weird data out of Excel and “do something with it” when little or (more often) no thought has been given to possibly making the data consistent or, dare I say, orderly.

To this end, I’ve put together another art project. This time, what you will see unfold before your peepers is a process of discovery - My thoughts on how these files are created.